Tuesday 16 June 2009

Tomato salad


Last week, at Borough Market, one of the fruit and veg stalls had a marvellously enticing array of tomatoes, I dived in and got a selection of colours and sizes and made an absolutely delicious tomato salad with them adding olive oil, lots of coarse sea salt and some torn basil leaves.

The winning tomatoes were the little torpedo shaped red ones (I think they were called super sarno?), they were so rich in flavour, whilst I didn't end up using the green ones because they tasted unripe, obviously they are green and are supposed to be tangier but these were verging on sour and inedible. They're currently residing on the kitchen windowsill next to the basil plant, enjoying the sun.

This is such a simple thing to put together but really has quite a spectacular flavour, we served it with some buffalo mozzarella and some fresh multi seed bread also from the market and the joy of it is that the salt brings out so much of the juice from the tomatoes that there's plenty to mop up with the bread. No recipe as such, use any tomatoes you can get your hands, chop them up into largish chunks, tear the basil, glug over a generous amount of good quality olive oil and sprinkle on plenty of salt. Delicious.

I also picked up some wet garlic and the guy at the stall didn't know anything about it. Any recommendations for ways to use this, I've briefly researched and not come up with much other than that they are milder in flavour than the dried variety and are good for roasting whole?

4 comments:

Dan said...

Fantastic stuff - looks so simple and fresh. Good dressed Tomatoes, with Buffalo Mozarella takes some beating.

Boo said...

Exactly, there are few food related things that I day dream more about than this combination! I could literally eat it everyday.

Helen said...

Yum, can't beat a simple tom salad. I went though a bit of a phase with wet garlic but when it comes down to it it is really just the same but milder. I like it in pasta but that isn't great if you are trying to avoid the carbs obviously!

Boo said...

I ended up just using it as I would use regular garlic, bit of a waste really as it's milder. Hmm, perhaps I'll give it a go in some pasta next time.